Tell HN: Troubleshooting Slack Crashes during screen sharing on Wayland

If you're a Linux user (like me) opted for Wayland display server, you might have encountered a frustrating crashes when you try to screen share during huddles. This issue has been a there since April 2023 release (Slack 4.31.155) for Linux and it's still not fixed till the date of submission of this post. I have tried multiple ways to make it work but in the end it still crashed.

Screen sharing is something which was very important to me as I cannot always create a google meet link for small discussions with my team. That's why we have huddle in slack.

I even tried to switch to X11 on my fedora workstation, but then I had to do the workarounds for gestures for touchpad with touchegg (sudo dnf install touchegg) and GNOME extension (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4033/x11-gestures/) and the results were not as smooth as they were on wayland. I always preferred wayland because of its performance and also noticed better battery life with it than X11.

After searching the web for hours, I finally found the solution on this issue tracker on github: https://github.com/flathub/com.slack.Slack/issues/196#issue-1684889894

The trick is simple, Just rollback to the version 4.29.149 with: sudo flatpak update --commit=b95d24a8a354db07b95b065b3e57e9442c9fbaf851a49cbe6e7b1aa0afcab591 com.slack.Slack and then just mask the package so it does not updates to latest version. flatpak mask com.slack.Slack

Now your screen sharing should work with wayland session. You can test to verify the working from Preferences -> Audio & Video -> Troubleshooting -> Run an audio, video and screensharing test or just start a huddle in an empty channel to test the screen sharing.

Devs hinted that the fix is in work with the latest Slack 4.34.115 release on 5th September 2023 (https://slack.com/intl/en-in/release-notes/linux), till it lands in production, we'll have to use Slack 4.29.149 for working screen sharing in wayland session.